Fooled You

‘A Working Theory of Love,’ by Scott Hutchins

You could argue that the fundamental question behind all literature is: “What does it mean to be human?” Some people have even argued that storytelling itself is what makes us more than just monkeys with iPhones — that Homer created the modern consciousness, or that Shakespeare (as Harold Bloom has it) invented the human identity. In recent years, however, literature has lost a lot of ground on that score to evolutionary psychology, neurobiology and computer science, and particularly to the efforts of artificial intelligence researchers. So as we wait for the Singularity, when our iPhones will become sentient and Siri will start telling us what we can do for her, many of the savvier fiction writers have begun to come to grips with the fact that the tutelary spirit of the quest for the human may not be Dante or Emily Dickinson or Virginia Woolf, but Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped start the revolution in computing.

Turing may be best known for his version of the Victorian-era Imitation Game, in which a judge receives written responses to his questions from a man and a woman behind a screen and tries to guess from the answers which is the man and which the woman. In Turing’s version, the messages are from a human and a computer; it was his contention that when a judge couldn’t tell the difference any longer, then a machine could be said to think like a human being. The Turing test has since become, at least in the popular imagination, the holy grail of artificial intelligence developers, as well as a conceit in contemporary fiction, and that conceit is at the heart of Scott Hutchins’s clever, funny and very entertaining first novel, “A Working Theory of Love.”

The novel’s wisecracking narrator is Neill Bassett Jr., a 30-something native of Arkansas who now lives the life of a rootless metrosexual in San Francisco. Though he’s not a scientist, he makes up one-third of a tiny computer start-up in Menlo Park, alongside an Indonesian programmer named Laham and their boss, an elderly European genius named Henry Livorno, who are working to create an artificial intelligence for a planned Turing test (which seems to be based on the annual Loebner Prize). Livorno has incorporated software into his computer that evokes the seven deadly sins, but more important, he has also loaded into its memory the 5,000-page diary of Neill’s father — the “Samuel Pepys of the South” — an Arkansas doctor who killed himself when Neill was 19. Neill’s job, as the real Dr. Bassett’s son, is to participate in a series of conversations with the programmed “Dr. Bassett” in order to make — its? his? — responses more lifelike. As a result, Neill finds himself engaging every day with a clever, if creepy, simulacrum of his dead father, leading him inevitably into a quest to find the reasons for the real doctor’s suicide.

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Scott HutchinsCredit
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Meanwhile, the novel also chronicles Neill’s feckless quest for love in San Francisco. He’s just gone through a divorce, and as the novel starts, he’s coming to the end of a period of revolving-door hookups, the last of which, with a troubled and impressionable young barista named Rachel, has the possibility of turning into something more. Not long after he starts seeing her, however, Neill finds himself flirting again with his ex-wife, and not long after that he finds himself in bed with a brusque but energetic young programmer for a rival company. (Her boss, a charismatically amoral former student of Livorno’s, is the founder and chief executive of an online dating company, who is leading a much better financed effort to win the Turing test.) In addition to all this, the novel encompasses Neill’s relationship with his mother, his return to Arkansas to get at the truth of his dad’s suicide and a good deal of expertly observed, if gentle, satire of life in the Bay Area.

That’s a lot of ground to cover even for an ambitious novelist, and one could easily imagine Don DeLillo or Richard Powers running with the same ideas and cast of characters for 800 pages or so. And while this is a very accomplished novel, it feels a bit as if Hutchins has given short shrift to its most original and exciting element: the philosophical struggle with the Turing test. The scenes in which the researchers volley with “Dr. Bassett” are the most electrifying in the book, and even though the journey through family history and the story of Neill’s romantic and sexual escapades are beautifully written and consistently engaging, I found myself eager to get back to the undead doctor, who in his halting, awkward fashion is the most affecting character in the book — much the way his direct ancestor HAL was the most lifelike character in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

That said, at the heart of Hutchins’s attempt to bring these plotlines together is a brilliant insight into the underpinnings of the Turing test in logical positivism: namely, the idea that the best you can say about consciousness, either human or machine, is that if the mind you’re dealing with seems conscious, then it is conscious, that in a positivist universe there is no difference between seeming and being. Hutchins then takes this a step further, by having Neill apply, or at least try to apply, that argument to his love life, and while I’m not sure the novel quite brings it off — the Turing test, when it happens, is surprisingly anticlimactic, and Neill’s romantic conflict resolves itself pretty much the way you suspect it will — simply raising the question in such an original way yields unexpected dividends. Hutchins is an unsentimental and compassionate creator of vivid characters, a master aphorist (“Artists are always the Johnny Appleseeds of gentrification”) and an expert architect of set pieces, not the least of which is a hilariously crass and creepily persuasive monologue by the matchmaking king, which takes online romance to its logical conclusion. You’ll never think of the term “computer dating” the same way again.

A novel is itself a kind of advanced Turing test, in which a writer tries to convince readers that lifeless signs on a page are not just real intelligences moving through the real world, but actual human beings, with lustful urges, deep regrets and breakable hearts. As this novel demonstrates, part of the challenge of giving a machine a truly human intelligence is making it sound humanly unreasonable. Turing predicted that in order to pass his test, a machine would have to fool a judge at least 30 percent of the time, but Scott Hutchins, in this charming, warmhearted and thought-provoking novel, already has that beat.

A WORKING THEORY OF LOVE

By Scott Hutchins

328 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

James Hynes is the author of the novels “Next” and “The Lecturer’s Tale.”

A version of this review appears in print on November 25, 2012, on Page BR25 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Fooled You. Today's Paper|Subscribe